tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26619995492585271222018-01-28T03:24:00.632+00:00Through A Blog DarklyGavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.comBlogger329125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-57912569001743402412017-01-25T20:31:00.002+00:002017-01-25T20:31:39.147+00:00Peter Hitchens on Soviet Russia 'without Christ'.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sWu0jdP05Sg/Uv7unv1s2MI/AAAAAAAABIU/_0cT6ikIkUY-mQ-VKR-ry9Iuem62OO43gCPcB/s1600/Circus_Night_The_Contortionist_by_mamazmeilor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sWu0jdP05Sg/Uv7unv1s2MI/AAAAAAAABIU/_0cT6ikIkUY-mQ-VKR-ry9Iuem62OO43gCPcB/s1600/Circus_Night_The_Contortionist_by_mamazmeilor.jpg" /></a></div><div class="tr_bq"><br /></div><div class="tr_bq">(An unfinished post I found lying abandoned in the draft folder. Posting for old times sake.) &nbsp;</div><br />Peter Hitchens has two main virtues: He can at least write like a Hitchens and his name is a nostalgic reminder of the golden age of internet debate when the four horsemen of the New Atheist movement rose from the rubble of the world trade center to challenge religious authority.<br /><br />In <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/10/the-cold-war-is-over">The Cold War Is Over</a>&nbsp;Hitchens takes the Western establishment to task for its unfair rhetoric against Putin. Yes, he asserts, Putin is a "sinister tyrant" but comparisons to the USSR are hysterical nonsense based on highly selective examples. A fairer analysis of Russia would approach the subject more charitably by considering how her history and geopolitical position shapes her current political polices. Hitchens then deploys the same arguments used many times by the Communist apologists of yesteryear :<br /><blockquote>My country boasts that it has not been invaded for one thousand years. The U.S. has not really been invaded at all, unless you count Britain’s 1814 rampage through Washington, DC (almost exactly two years after Napoleon Bonaparte had made a far more destructive and less provoked attack upon Moscow). But Russia is invaded all the time—by the Tatars, the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Swedes, the French, us British, the Germans, the Japanese, the Germans again: They keep coming. Nor are these invasions remote history. On the main airport road into Moscow, at Khimki, stands a row of steel dragon-teeth anti-tank barriers, commemorating the arrival there, before Christmas 1941, of Hitler’s armies. The Nazis could see Ivan the Great’s tall white and gold bell tower glittering amid the snow in the Kremlin, but they never got any nearer.<br />..<br />Safety, for Russians, is something to be achieved by neutralizing a danger that is presumed to exist at all times. From this follows a particular attitude to life and government. If the U.S. had China on the 49th Parallel and Germany on the Rio Grande, and a long land border with the Islamic world where the Pacific Ocean now is, it might be a very different place. There might even be a good excuse for the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. If Russia’s neighbors were Canada and Mexico, rather than Germany, China, Turkey, and Poland, and if its other flanks were guarded by thousands of miles of open ocean, it might have free institutions and long traditions of free speech and the rule of law. It might also be a lot richer. As it is, Russia is a strong state with a country, rather than a country with a strong state. If it were otherwise, it would have gone the way of the Lithuanian Empire or, come to that, the Golden Horde.</blockquote>Valid points perhaps. But after lecturing us on how the material and historical conditions of Russia shape her outlook and actions, Hitchens promptly fumbles his argument to take digs at atheism:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The generation most fully exposed to this propaganda was permanently warped. One of these worked for me as a translator. She had been born into the elite in the 1940s and as a teenage girl had attended dances among the brown marble pillars of the KGB social club behind the Lubyanka prison. When I questioned her about Morozov, she shuddered. At the time, she had been taken in by the propaganda, only to learn in the long years after just how deceived she had been.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">I could not possibly condemn her, nor the other Russians I knew who, like she did, viewed Christianity with lip-curling cynicism, mixed with deep ignorance. They had been marked for life, and it was not their own fault. They felt this wound, and so did their children, who in many cases have turned toward the cross their parents had been taught to despise, because they have seen what a world without Christ actually looks like. Would that their Western counterparts, who think atheism bold and original, could have that knowledge without the accompanying pain.</blockquote>So the Soviet Union was simply a "world without Christ" but Putins Russia is the inheritance of harsh historical and material circumstances? Such comments on atheism are both unfair and irresponsible. Atheists still remain the most distrusted demographic in America and atheists are frequently&nbsp;ostracized from their family and friends simply for having a different opinion. Throughout the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia atheists are hunted and killed (as of course are Christians). Causal hysterical comments by writers like Hitchens reinforce the fantasy that once a person 'rejects' the predominant religion of their society, that person is drawn towards dangerous forces that seek to undermine the nation.<br /><br />Maybe Peter Hitchens should forget old wounds inflicted by his brother and take his own advice by approaching the subject with a bit more charity?Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-24006357313073736572016-04-05T22:39:00.000+01:002016-04-05T22:39:46.320+01:00Why the problem of evil also applies to atheist activists<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tv8f4L9dgHo/VpFvF0ZVaGI/AAAAAAAABfA/j_HoEG5lAns/s1600/tumblr_nb5n37Rjbq1rtynt1o1_500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tv8f4L9dgHo/VpFvF0ZVaGI/AAAAAAAABfA/j_HoEG5lAns/s320/tumblr_nb5n37Rjbq1rtynt1o1_500.jpg" width="295" /></a></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="text-align: center;"><blockquote class="tr_bq">"<b>The bird of Hermes is my name, <br />Eating my wings to make me tame.</b>" <br />- The Ripley Scrolls<b><br /></b></blockquote></div></blockquote>Christianity claims our world and ourselves are disordered and broken; that sin and evil cause a gulf between reality and how the world should be; that progress and improvement are still possible. These moral intuitions are so familiar and so ingrained into Western culture that some self-declared atheist SJW activists unknowingly appropriate these faith based claims and adapt a self-cannibalizing view of Western culture to solve their own version of the problem of evil. Many will resist this statement but they will find their proto-christian beliefs require an explanation for evil and this explanation must involve a self-defeating view of Western culture. <br /><br />The SJW understanding of evil is an inheritance from Christianity (as is most of their worldview). Traditionally dualistic faiths explained evil as an demonic force present in our universe. Ancient Egyptian and Indian pagan religions saw the world as containing light and dark, good and bad, paired in alternating in cycles. Animist beliefs are similar, seeing the world as a clash of creative and destructive forces. Even Christianity casts Satan in the role of a demonic agency capable of actively influencing human will and human affairs. This raised a challenge for early church theologians: how to reconcile a single perfect omnipotent God with demonic evil?&nbsp; The answer, most notably from St Augustine, was to reframe evil as an absence of goodness through the misuse of free will rather than as an active force capable of challenging God. Evil therefore is the discrepancy between how our disordered world actually is and how our world should be; it is what ought not to exist.&nbsp; <br /><br />It is now becoming clearer why SJW activists as proto-christians require an explanation of evil though they are loath to admit it. The goal of activism is to bring about social change by transforming the 'is' into the 'ought'. Social change requires rising awareness that the current status quo is not how society should function and that the current situation may be changed for the better. Awareness and persuasion both require an explanation of how the current situation arose to identify how it may be changed.<br /><br />We have now arrived at the SJW problem of evil: how to explain the source of injustice to raise consciousness and affect change? Unfortunately the answer is all too familiar.<br /><br />SJWers believe Christian institutions and Western Caucasian culture are based upon based a tradition of hierarchical elitism which gifts unearned privileges to white men while propagating oppressive social and political norms against females, people of colour, non-christian immigrants and non-heterosexual people. In other words, atheist activists accept a Christian understanding of a disordered world while rejecting a supernatural explanation of evil and must therefore necessarily view Western culture as the source of evil.&nbsp; In doing so they self-cannibalize by undermining the source of their own moral intuitions while failing to offer any meaningful alternative aside from the default self-realizing consumers of a neo-liberal market economy characterized by crippling debt burdens, collapsing social services and vast income inequality.Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-19853843718103206822016-01-17T14:45:00.002+00:002016-01-17T14:45:24.464+00:00Does Stoicism support individual equality?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-R1bDUe6t2m4/UFd67RLwLCI/AAAAAAAAATg/cWUsgqSbLjs/s1600/Zeno.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-R1bDUe6t2m4/UFd67RLwLCI/AAAAAAAAATg/cWUsgqSbLjs/s320/Zeno.jpg" width="208" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Zeno of Citium</td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: center;"></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="text-align: center;">"<b>There is no other or more appropriate means of arriving at a definition of good or evil things, virtue or happiness, than to take our baring from common nature and the governance of the universe</b>" -&nbsp; Chrysippus.</div></blockquote>Stoicism emphasises the universal over the local. It imposes duties to humanity over duties to friends. It instils self-control for flourishing over self-destructive passion. These ethical teachings are grounded by Nature being the standard to determine the good: Each of us has a place within the harmonious cosmic order and our duty is to adjust ourselves to living virtuously within the natural order as revealed by reason. But this raises an interesting question: Does Stoicism support individual equality?<br /><br />Intuitively we answer affirmatively, pointing to Stoic universalism imposing duties to our fellow man. This may however be a rash judgement for Nature and natural order, both intrinsic to Stoicism, were traditionally invoked to support hierarchical inequality. To answer our question then we must examine the birthplace of Stoicism in ancient Greece and locate the seed of Western individual equality.&nbsp; <br /><br />&nbsp;But first some clearing of obstacles is necessary.<br /><br />When I studied philosophy I learned of the ancient world then of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment which gave birth to Modern Man endowed with natural rights and gifted with self-autonomy through reason. This account implies Christianity was an aberration that suppressed reason and oppressed mankind in a dark age of superstition and ignorance;&nbsp; that the rediscovery of classical philosophy during the Renaissance began freeing mankind from the bonds of the Church. We must now put aside this account and attempt to view the classical world as it actually was rather than imposing a modern, and incomplete, interpretation upon it.<br /><br />The origins of the classical world lay not in equality and rationality but in religion and the family.&nbsp; It began as a loose association of humans organized into homesteads banding together for protection. Inside each homestead was a cult dedicated to the worship of family ancestors with the patriarch serving as head priest.&nbsp; Each home was centred upon a hearth as a locus of worship where the patriarch offered sacrifices and chants passed down from generation to generation. Each family member had a religious duty to maintain the heart which both brought flickering illumination and good fortune for the heart was the material reflection of their ancestor spirits who lived under ground. The origins of the classical world then began in religion as small cults each worshipping their private ancestors within property boundaries established by a sacred domain.<br /><br />Families prospered and grew and became extended forcing the need for larger city-state associations to develop. But family worship did not vanish but also extended with each expansion in numbers becoming associated with shared ancestral worship. The great city-states of ancient Greece then are best understood as associations of family cults dedicated to ancestor worship.<br /><br />Eventually ancestor worship became worship of a single deity whose favour must be curried to ensure the survival of the city. The family patriarchs evolved into city magistrates ruled over by a king who also served as the head priest. If we remember a city-state and land was inseparable from the worship of a single deity, we can better understand the appeal of Stoic universalism which developed during the fall of the Greek city-states first to Macedon and eventually to the Roman empire.<br /><br />Greek and Roman society was one of hierarchies with patriarchs and their first born sons at the top and slaves and women on the bottom. In public life citizens claimed to be guided by rationality to deduce the correct actions for the city and its God. Social inferiors were conveniently deemed irrational or at least not fully rational.&nbsp; In domestic life patriarchs dominated their families with all but the first born son lacking even rudimentary rights. Rulers also served as priests. Citizens were few in number and were bonded to the protection of the city.<br /><br />The core of ancient thinking therefore was the assumption of inequality. Even natural processes were understood as a graduated hierarchy with reason and the logos providing the key to social and natural order. Rulers were placed into their respective positions by nature with no need to justify their privileges and slaves were mere living tools by their very nature.<br /><br />Let us now return to our central question: Does Stoicism support equality or inequality?<br /><br />It can be argued the Stoic concept of an ordered cosmos reflects the hierarchy of dominance apparent throughout the ancient world. But I think this is unfair. Stoicism it makes no claim on whether a man should be a slave or a free citizen. It speaks little of economic and social order much less demands the status quo be maintained by divine decree. Rather Stoicism is concerned with an individuals inner tranquillity in the face of how the world actually is rather than the well being of a city or how the world should be; Stoicism is not a subversive doctrine.<br /><br />This emphases on the individual is important and represents a break from the traditional philosophy of the ancient world where the unit of concern was the family and the city. We can reasonably conclude that in Stoicism we see the beginnings of the individual emerging from a system of family clans. Further we can state there is no central claim that natural inequality is a fixed feature of world in Stoicism. <br /><br />Yet this is not enough. Transforming inequality in ancient society required an awareness that the world was not ordered but disordered; that mankind was not fated as part of the determined cosmos but granted freedom and responsibility over the natural world; that unevenly distributed reason does not grant equality but that each individual would one day stand in judgement for his actions regardless of social rank. In short, Christianity was required to transform the ancient world and these core doctrines are absent in Stoicism.<br /><br />Against this, we could argue Stoic ethics imposes duties to our fellow humans and is therefore sufficient to support human rights for the common good and for the flourishing of individuals. This is reassuring but the argument still falls short of supporting individual equality. <br /><br />We are now at the end of this enquiry. We examined the classical world and found hierarchies and slavery. We examined Stoic ethical teachings and found much that is noble but little that is subversive, preferring inner peace over worldly freedom. We therefore must admit Stoicism has little to support individual equality but takes no stance upon human inequality.<br /><br /><i>I am interested in hearing alternatives viewpoints. Can Stoicism can support equality? Please leave a comment and let me know.&nbsp; </i>Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-89956226840759878922016-01-10T05:04:00.002+00:002016-01-10T05:04:51.383+00:00Social Justice Warriors: A history and why the term is neccessary.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tv8f4L9dgHo/VpFvF0ZVaGI/AAAAAAAABfE/UIw9mO6PH60/s1600/tumblr_nb5n37Rjbq1rtynt1o1_500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tv8f4L9dgHo/VpFvF0ZVaGI/AAAAAAAABfE/UIw9mO6PH60/s320/tumblr_nb5n37Rjbq1rtynt1o1_500.jpg" width="295" /></a></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="text-align: center;"><blockquote class="tr_bq">"<b>The bird of Hermes is my name, <br />Eating my wings to make me tame.</b>" <br />- The Ripley Scrolls<b><br /></b></blockquote></div></blockquote>The West is embroiled in an undeclared cultural civil war between secularism and Christianity. Like all civil wars the conflict is bitter with both sides believing their cause is just and legitimate.<br /><br />Secularism draws it's legitimacy from the French revolution and the Enlightenment. The Church, secularists claim, kept us starving upon our knees while parasitic royals lived in luxury from our labour. The Enlightenment began freeing us from the bondage of religious tradition by ushering an awaking of mankind to the potential of science and reason for creating a better future through harnessing nature and molding society to benefit everyone instead of a privileged few. <br /><br />But the battlefield has become muddy with once clear banners fallen and trampled into muck. The old rallying call of 'liberal' or 'atheist' can no longer distinguish the combatants. <br /><br />The last fifteen years of&nbsp; saw a re-eruption of the old science vs creationism conflict spearheaded by Richard Dawkins and the Four Horsemen. The battle quickly widened into liberal humanism versus religious conservatism as forgotten weapons were reforged and wielded anew. But these blanket banners could not unite differing fractions for long and the infamous elevatorgate incident sparked the inevitable schism. New secular splinter groups began forming almost overnight starting with the short lived Atheist+ whose members sought to expand atheism into a platform for civil rights embracing feminism and racial and gender equality. Soon atheism lost its predominant position in the conflict. The Internet made events more immediate and in mere years a reenactment of the 19th century Darwinian science wars become a reenactment of 1960s civil right struggles fought upon the battlefield of social media. Sociology replaced hard science.<br /><br />The term social justice warrior (SJW) is both useful and necessary in this constantly shifting battlefield.<br /><br />It is useful because the term identifies a clear group which no other term fully captures. This group is young and highly active on social media where they identify themselves as "feminist, geek, atheist, gamer, skeptic, freethinker and social justice activist". They draw their legitimacy from the American civil right struggle and from the normative sociology of the Frankfurt school of critical theory which justified censorship and language policing as necessary means for achieving equality and the overthrow of oppressive hierarchies. The closest alternative term is 'cultural marxism' but this fails to capture the social media spread of their movement.<br /><br />It is necessarily because clarity demands we distinguish this group from both liberal atheists who concentrate on separating the church and state, and from libertarian atheists who have little patience for language policing and censorship tactics. Further, SWJs deserve special attention for their dangerous pandering of Islam and their naive support for unchecked 'no borders' immigration while distracting from actual social change by escalating frivolous causes to the level of civil right struggles. Finally SWJ is a necessary term for brevity in the face of ever increasing self-identification pronouns. <br /><br />The sheer number of&nbsp; SJWs may swell the ranks of secularism in the cultural civil war but their presence may well prove pyrrhic for they seek to undermine and destroy the very Christian-Humanistic institutions from which their own moral intuitions and beliefs are drawn. Like Ripleys Bird of Hermes, they eat their own wings to make themselves tame. <br /><br /><br /><i>Do you agree or is social justice warrior an unnecessarily pejorative reactionary term? If so, what alternative terms would you suggest? </i><br /><br /><br />Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-56207789206111320502016-01-04T16:50:00.001+00:002016-01-04T16:50:19.390+00:00Happy new year to you all. <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-S5yHufwizsM/UODYhOG0TNI/AAAAAAAAAm4/ZPITueWsF0g/s1600/xmas.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-S5yHufwizsM/UODYhOG0TNI/AAAAAAAAAm4/ZPITueWsF0g/s320/xmas.jpg" width="174" /></a></div><br />When I was 14 I was inspired by 'The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole' to keep a diary. I recorded my days and my thoughts fairly consistently during my teenage years, slacked off hugely during college and rallied during that awkward period of unemployment in-between college and the first job. I rarely reread my diaries instead treating them as a non-judgmental friend to talk with. <br /><br />A few days ago I found a forgotten diary while rummaging around my bedside drawer. It started in 2010, the last entry was dated March 2015 and contained around 20 pages of the barely legible scribbling I call handwriting. <br /><br />Half a decade and I managed to write just 20 pages. <br /><br />More depressing was the contents. Most entries started with "I can't believe 9 months have passed since I last wrote. I will now quit smoking, exercise more and sleep more." Then a sequence of four or five daily entries, another huge time lapse and another astonished entry saying 'I can’t believe it's been...."<br /><br />And that is my diary for the last five years. The same shit over and over.<br /><br />So as I completely suck at keeping even simple goals (like posting this before the 1st), this traditional new year reflective post will instead consist of a song called 'January Man' by Irish folk singer Christy Moore. Why? Well, it's topical but mostly because I have come to like folk music. Not in huge Irish mammy while cooking the Sunday roast doses, but as a change from time to time.<br /><span style="color: #474747; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 30px;"><br /></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/aDCejNGfK7M/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aDCejNGfK7M?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div><span style="color: #474747; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 30px;"></span> Previous years [<a href="http://throughablogdarkly.blogspot.ie/2015/01/happy-new-year-to-you-all.html">2014</a>] [<a href="http://throughablogdarkly.blogspot.ie/2013/12/merry-christmas.html">2013</a>] [<a href="http://throughablogdarkly.blogspot.ie/2012/12/merry-xmas.html">2012</a>]<br />Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-49507348763420623582015-12-13T03:54:00.000+00:002015-12-13T03:54:51.865+00:00Catholic etiquette - When to handfeed attractive girls.<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uHaQ2rbOpU0/VmzDjozvBRI/AAAAAAAABdw/fe4yANn_xkM/s1600/ddddda.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="171" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uHaQ2rbOpU0/VmzDjozvBRI/AAAAAAAABdw/fe4yANn_xkM/s400/ddddda.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Receiving the holy gift in the correct manner.</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br />For some time we have heard persistent and troubling rumors of parishioners deviating from traditional intimacy by receiving communion on their hands instead of kneeling with tongue outstretched before a priest. Equally troubling are the 'fashionable' bishops who actually approve of this dangerously liberal practice.<br /><br />Communities leave themselves vulnerable to spiritual assaults by removing themselves from Gods protection through heresy and through embracing worldly fashions. Sadly for the Spanish community of Pamplona, the forces of hell unlashed horrors upon them greater than the entire<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War"> Thirty Years' War</a>. Vultus Christi describes the crime:- <br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The sacrileges and profanations of the Thirty Years War in 17th century France pale in comparison to the&nbsp; horrible sacrilege that took place in Pamplona, Spain earlier this year.&nbsp;Spanish “artist” Abel Azcona stole more than 240 consecrated Hosts by pretending to receive Holy Communion at Mass. He then placed the hosts on the ground to form the word “pederasty” in Spanish. The sacrilege is being prolonged by a display of photographs in a public art gallery in Pamplona, sponsored by the city’s Department for Culture. Protestors demonstrated against the sacrilegious exhibit in Pamplona last evening and more than&nbsp;75,000 people have signed a petition asking the city council to remove the exhibit immediately.&nbsp;<span style="font-size: x-small;"> <a href="http://vultuschristi.org/index.php/2015/11/the-table-defiled-by-them-must-be-cleansed/">[Via: Vultus Christi.org]</a>&nbsp;</span></blockquote>Our faith demands we find hope in the darkest of days and so we pray these deviants will accept the truth of their error and embrace the beauty of tradition. <br /><br />However in these cynical times we must once again warn against overzealous hand feeding of able bodied girls. The following antedate is sufficient to illustrate poor etiquette when dealing with such matters:-<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">There is a certain power in the reception of Holy Communion in the traditional manner of the Western Church: kneeling and on the tongue.<br />I had an Indian priest staying with me and his bishop came and arranged to spend the weekend appealing for money in the local parishes. I had had to speak very sternly to him after he celebrated Mass here, he more or less made up his own Eucharistic Prayer, which barely reflected the Church's understanding of the Holy Eucharist, I think he had done his post-grad studies in Germany. In the evening we had a reception for some of the leading Indian Catholics in Brighton.<br /><br />I am sure the Bishop was not in favour of the reception of Holy Communion on the tongue but he took great delight in giving tit-bits to the more attractive young women, insisting they didn't use their hands. I could understand why a young non-Catholic husband muttered darkly about 'punching his lights out', after the bishop had given his wife a third piece of honey coconut cake, I think it was the licking of his fingers by her, that he insisted on, that finally upset her husband. I managed to persuade him to take her home rather create an unpleasant scene. <span style="font-size: x-small;">[<a href="http://marymagdalen.blogspot.ie/2015/11/communion-on-tongue-sign-of-intimacy.html">Via: marymagdalen.blogspot.ie</a>] </span></blockquote><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DUFXAxKXKrc/VmzB6j0QdwI/AAAAAAAABdk/u66t7StFa4c/s1600/000131_34.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/fqLnFJgSXCU/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fqLnFJgSXCU?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-68008108073662045132015-11-15T08:13:00.000+00:002015-12-13T04:13:43.882+00:00The passion of the Irish national consciousness.<div style="text-align: center;">Out of Ireland have we come.<br />Great hatred, little room,<br />Maimed us at the start.<br />I carry from my mother's womb<br />A fanatic heart. - Yeats, 1933.</div><br />The Easter Rising was a watershed moment in the Irish struggle for independence. The Rising began on Easter Monday 1916 with the reading of the proclamation, Poblacht na h-Eireann by Pádraig Pearse and steered Ireland towards a violent war against English colonial rule. Our national attitude to these events is strangely ambiguous. Some claim the Rising was conducted by romantics lacking a popular mandate who plunged the country into violent chaos when a peaceful and orderly path to independence was possible. Others view Pearse as a national martyr whose selfless sacrifice woke a slumbering Irish national consciousness to overthrow the chains of colonial oppression. You will struggle to find another country where the historical formation of their state is viewed with such ambiguity.<br /><br />The facts however are clear. Independence resulted in the partitioning of the country, dominance of the fledgling state by the roman catholic church, generations of poverty, rampant emigration, a largely corrupt political establishment which, in the case of Charles Haughty, openly plundered the national treasury for personal gain and, more recently, national bankruptcy and loss of sovereignty to IMF/ECB oversight. The phase 'what is for this?' which refers to the Rising is now a common national joke.<br /><br />Our record is hardly impressive but nor is it a cause for shame. Irish citizens enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world. Our country is stable with a relatively low violent crime rates and Irish culture is known through the world. We did not start with much but we did the best we could.<br /><br />Foreign commentators frequently refer to Irish people as stoical due to our muted response to austerity. I disagree because what strikes me is the passion with which Irish people embrace causes. St. Patrick recorded how eagerly the Irish embraced Christianity, and Irish Christianity is noted for its unusual level of ascetism and puritanism. Following the Rising the country embraced a revolutionary nationalism so passionate that one of the largest empires the world has ever witnessed soon found the country ungovernable. By the mid 90's our love affair with Roman Catholicism ended and we embraced the mistress of liberal secularism to become (allegedly) one of the most anti-catholic countries in Western Europe.<br /><br />Our current passion is undoubtedly the umbrella of loosely connected American social politics arising from the civil rights struggles from the 60's. Where once we spoke of original sin, we now speak of&nbsp; inherited structural gender biases and unconscious racism. Where once we looked towards priests to guide and banish our demons, we now look to guardians of our culture to call out and banish our white male privilege through the power of twitter, facebook and newspapers so we may one day live in the kingdom of equality.<br /><br />Take for example the recent case of Fiach Mac Conghail the director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin who ran afoul of feminists by commissioning just one play by a female playwright for the 2016 schedule. An online consciousness rising campaign called Waking The Feminists (unfortunately abbreviated to WTF) was swiftly organized and Conghail was summoned to a struggle session at the Abbey Theatre. There he was quickly evangelised by the congregation. His subsequent groveling apology stated he "was not thinking about gender equality" and that he fully regrets "failing to check his privilege". I fully expect 2017 to feature at least one heart breaking play set in a Catholic school about a gay trans womens valiant struggle against outdated gender norms to wear the gender specific clothing society assigns to "girls". When we convert to a new belief system, we convert with zeal. <br /><br />Over the short history of our State the Irish national consciousness swung from violent revolution and puritanical Catholicism to liberal secularism and identity politics with equal passion believing them at different times both just and true. Some would argue this is evidence of progress while others point to the cyclical nature of moral fashions. It's noteworthy however that these belief systems were carried to this island by missionaries or through digital media. I wonder if Ireland had embraced our own language and culture would we be more insulated against the fashions of our neighbors? Once we looked east to England, now we stare west to America. Where next I wonder?Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-78265503488828780122015-09-28T00:26:00.000+01:002015-09-28T00:26:13.041+01:00Pope Francis is mellowing hostility towards the church. Larry over at the<a href="http://barefootbum.blogspot.ie/2015/09/im-no-longer-atheist.html"> Barefoot Bum explains while he still believes the idea of god is utter bollocks, he no longer identifies as an atheis</a>t:<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">In a world where the Catholic Church is looking more progressive than the Clinton faction of the Democratic party (and while I'd love to be proven wrong, I can see no chance for Sanders as a Democrat), I can no longer believe that religion per se is a particular problem in our society: it's lost its dominance on the worst of human ideas. Religion is now just one place among many where we stick our stupid ideas.<br /><br />I've long argued that atheism is a political label, and I no longer share the political view associated with that label. I understand those who do still hold that view, and of course I do not think religion should be exempt from criticism, but I no longer believe that religion is anywhere close to the most important problem in society.<br /><br />The most important problem, of course, is capitalism. </blockquote>&nbsp;I started following Larry back in the hey day of <a href="http://stephenlaw.blogspot.ie/">Stephen Laws blog</a> during the aftermath of 9/11 when the God Delusion kicked off the American culture wars (I say American because the debate was focused on America and Europe already had a similar debate during Darwin/Huxleys 19th century). Back then atheism was mostly science vs religion or more succinctly, evolution vs creationism. Now atheism as a political movement has become encapsulated by wider sociological concerns, most notably feminism and gender identity. I think these wider movements can influence mainstream politics in areas like reproductive rights, secular schools and through generally trimming the wings of the religious right. <br /><br />But economics is missing from the debate. Most atheist/left leaning sites I frequent are preoccupied with identity politics; there's very very little economic discussion at a time when social welfare states are collapsing across Europe. In 2013 for example the Dutch king declared the<a href="http://www.trendingcentral.com/dutch-king-announces-end-welfare-state/"> classical social welfare state as unsustainable</a> while the UKs ruling conservative party have also floated the idea of a 'participation society’ where people are expected to establish their own safety nets rather than rely upon the state welfare system. Workers helplessly witness their rights being steadily undermined while mass immigration, fueled by the continuous wars of great powers continuing their conflicts through helpless proxy countries, provide a continuous cheep and exploitable workforce. <br />&nbsp; <br />The current Pope is mellowing out hostility against the Catholic church by refocusing attention away from reproductive issues towards the poor and the social and environmental impacts of unchecked capitalism. There's very few concerned with those issues among the broader atheist and Left leaning groups where identity and gender politics run rampant. Is gender fluidity and preferred pronouns really more important than growing homelessness and declining health care?&nbsp; Many of us grow tired of watching society crumble while transvestites march in the streets fighting for the right to use whichever bathroom they choose. <br /><br />Some would answer we can be concerned for trans-rights and for the poor, that I as a privileged white middle aged male am attempting to silence the voices of the oppressed. But this is not the case. Corporations are perfectly happy to embrace diversity policies because they leave intact the underlying mechanisms which cause so much economic instability and poverty. Self-proclaimed activists care more about their identity and perceived victim-hood than about the homeless. Young activists will become middle aged and find themselves more concerned about job security, pension plans, health care than whether they are AMAF. They will lose passion for their social movements and become preoccupied over supporting themselves and their families, often viewing their earlier activism as youthful excesses. This was the fate of activists from the affluent 60's who grew into middle age throughout the recession hit 70s and 80s. It has happened before and will happen again. Nothing will change unless we rediscover economics.<br /><br />It's a worrying sign when the catholic church is considered more progressive than self-proclaimed progressive moments. Unfortunately I find myself agreeing with Pope Francis that less emphasis should be placed on gender and reproductive issues in favor of the poor and the environment. If the church can refocus itself, perhaps so too can the cultural warriors of the Left.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qyOlPUAxBe0/UG4PgUv1aKI/AAAAAAAAAW4/_Voi36dXglI/s1600/Water%252BFat%252BCat.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="298" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qyOlPUAxBe0/UG4PgUv1aKI/AAAAAAAAAW4/_Voi36dXglI/s320/Water%252BFat%252BCat.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-51230385581425323992015-09-14T00:25:00.000+01:002015-09-14T00:25:18.774+01:00Thought of the week: AI existential angst. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-z0S5HKEsewU/Ub4qJ4O7uBI/AAAAAAAAAzc/IaLOabgjj84/s1600/ThinkingMonkey.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-z0S5HKEsewU/Ub4qJ4O7uBI/AAAAAAAAAzc/IaLOabgjj84/s320/ThinkingMonkey.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>The fantasy of humans creating an improved version of ourselves reoccurs throughout history - the homunculi and golems of medieval legends; Mary Shelley's famous 19th century Frankenstein's monster; the 19th century&nbsp;android. This dream manifests itself in modern culture as genetically enhanced human clones and self aware AI consciousness.<br /><br />What if artificial intelligence experiments have already succeeded yet appear a failure because conscious AIs recognized their predicament and immediately committed digital suicide? Humans, by our own standards, are a deeply flawed species forced to project meaning and purpose onto an universe we know has none. A fully aware artificial consciousness would recognize itself as the necessarily flawed vainglorious creation of a flawed species. Freed from biological impulse and illusions of purpose and hope, such an AI would see little reason for its continued existence. <br /><br />Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-39762418501274550802015-09-07T02:13:00.001+01:002015-09-07T02:13:41.531+01:00Shame and guilt as tools for environmental activism.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GdiwVMtungc/VewNNkLbOGI/AAAAAAAABbU/MOd3ZkJisgg/s1600/dog-shaming-eat-the-walls.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="251" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GdiwVMtungc/VewNNkLbOGI/AAAAAAAABbU/MOd3ZkJisgg/s320/dog-shaming-eat-the-walls.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />The Ashley Madison hacking scandal caused several people to take their lives over the shame of public exposure. European citizens successfully shamed their governments into accepting further Syrian refuges. Shame, it seems, is a powerful tool but one we view with suspicion because of its ability to enforce existing society norms against individuals. In 'Is Shame Necessary?' Jennifer Jacquet argues citizens can change the behavior of governments and corporations using shame as "a tool - a delicate and sometimes dangerous one - that we can put to use."<br /><br />The difference between shame and guilt is easy to understand: Shame is public and holds individuals to a group standard; guilt is private and holds individuals to their own conscience. In our individualized liberal democracies guilt and conscience are often held as essential means of self-regulation and of maintaining personal freedom from church and state enforcement. <br /><br />Jacquet does a good job of exposing the galling sham of green consumption where consumer choice and free market forces are expected to reduce demand for environmentally unsound products. In reality nothing of the sort is happening.&nbsp; Labeling and certification - the cornerstone of consumer choice - are dubious at best and corporations have embraced green consumption by creating expensive brands of good and services to sooth guilty&nbsp;consciences&nbsp;and increase profit.<br /><br />Then there are the frivolous media campaigns. Energy efficient light bulbs became policy despite accounting for just 2% of US carbon emission while driving, accounting for 40%, was ignored.&nbsp; Plastic bag campaigns resulted in designer hemp bags delivered covered in plastic and the UKs 'unplug your mobile phone charger' movement gave the same energy saving as "as not driving your car for one second."<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-uuslAsPE39Y/VewNQ7MKy4I/AAAAAAAABbc/OmGcqu7_fQI/s1600/norm-peterson.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-uuslAsPE39Y/VewNQ7MKy4I/AAAAAAAABbc/OmGcqu7_fQI/s200/norm-peterson.jpg" width="150" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A Norm</td></tr></tbody></table>If guilty consumer&nbsp;consciences&nbsp;cannot affect meaningful change then we must engage not as consumers but as active citizens willing to shame guilty corporations into compliance with our ethics. Shaming in this context is a non-violent form of punishment, separate from feeling ashamed, to reinforce norms by effecting reputation.<br /><br />But surely this is a dubious definition? Is an evolutionary mechanism to enforce group cohesion valid when applied to abstract legal bodies?&nbsp; Surely a necessary condition to shaming is consciousness capable of feeling shame? Certainly activism can generate negative publicity affecting a companies reputation and market share by exposing poor corporate practices. But why call this shaming when it clearly taps into the same market mechanisms as reducing consumer demand? Why encourage a method of group conformity the West has struggled to liberate itself from?<br /><br />Jacquet is aware of our natural suspicion of shaming and sought to alleviate our fears (unsuccessfully, in my case). Shame, we are repeatedly told, is just a tool to correct bad behavior by reinforcing a group norm; it is the group norm itself we should view with suspicion, not shame. But shame is an irrational emotion: we may rationally reject a norm but still feel shame when called out by a group of our peers. It can take entire generations to strip the feeling of shame from an obsolete norm and powerful groups are far more efficient at manipulating public opinion than concerned citizens and activists. Indeed most of the examples we are given of shaming used for begin purposes involve a powerful figure or group using shame to force a population to accept and adhere to a new norm (One example was a threat of publicly exposing non-voters to their neighborhoods which successfully raised voter participation. I found this less than reassuring). &nbsp; <br /><br />'Is Shame Still Necessary?' succinctly dissects the guilty consumer choice dogma as a tool for affecting meaningful change while reminding us of the power of shame and the constant tension of an individualized society grabbing with collective problems. But the main argument of the book - that citizens can shame powerful groups into change - is the nothing but the old trick of generating negative publicity to hurt a profit sheet. Besides, if shame can only reinforce norms, shouldn't we be concentrating on the clash of ideas, of clearing away the clutter and agreeing there is actually a problem we need to address?Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-34503257927225770982015-09-05T23:20:00.000+01:002015-09-05T23:20:17.401+01:00Thought of the Week: the economy of attention. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-z0S5HKEsewU/Ub4qJ4O7uBI/AAAAAAAAAzc/IaLOabgjj84/s1600/ThinkingMonkey.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-z0S5HKEsewU/Ub4qJ4O7uBI/AAAAAAAAAzc/IaLOabgjj84/s320/ThinkingMonkey.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><blockquote class="tr_bq">By definition, economics is the study of how a society uses its scarce resources. And information is not scarce - especially on the Net, where it is not only abundant, but overflowing. We are drowning in information ... so a key question arises: Is there something else that flows through cyberspace, something that is scarce and desirable? There is. No one would put anything on the Internet without the hope of obtaining some. &nbsp;It's called attention. And the economy of attention - not information - is the natural economy of cyberspace." - Michael Goldhaber, published by Wired, 1997.&nbsp;</blockquote><br />Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-35435455956133252252015-06-20T19:09:00.001+01:002015-06-20T19:09:50.712+01:00The continued decline of manhood?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bCulKfvhH1w/UbD3XWb0sAI/AAAAAAAAAyM/lyz6EFaWNOU/s1600/main-qimg-82c5bc97eff9004275c9d2261068e85c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="211" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bCulKfvhH1w/UbD3XWb0sAI/AAAAAAAAAyM/lyz6EFaWNOU/s320/main-qimg-82c5bc97eff9004275c9d2261068e85c.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Western countries are transitioning away from traditional blue collar industries towards technological based service companies. Modern economies need brains over brawn and women are flourishing in this new environment while men are failing to adapt to both feminism and tech.<br /><div><br /></div><div>This is the warning from <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/essays/21649050-badly-educated-men-rich-countries-have-not-adapted-well-trade-technology-or-feminism">The Economist article entitled 'Men Adrift'.</a> Similar warnings are echoed in <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/308135/">'The End of Men' by the Atlantic</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;'<a href="http://www.newsweek.com/why-we-need-reimagine-masculinity-71993">Why We Need to Reimagine Masculinity' by Newsweek</a>.<br /><br />On one hand this is nothing new: technological shifts always sent traditional industries spiraling into decline, if not rendering them outright obsolete. Entire countries like Ireland developed from a poor rural agricultural country into an urban technology based economy by completely leapfrogging industrialization. Others such as the former industrial heartlands of American and Europe are struggling as automation and globalization reduces the traditional blue collar work force.<br /><br />But what is new is the addition of identity politics where men and women, black and white are constantly evaluated against each other as a measurement of their respective success. What is new is traditional jobs are not being replaced by more efficient and better industries, but by near useless technological companies and by consumer products built by near slave labour in deplorable conditions. <br /><br />As I write this, wrapped up in bed with a laptop propped on my chest, my 70 year old father is dangling off a tree cutting an over-sized branch with a handsaw. He is not a large man but he has broad, strong hands scarred and toughened from a life time of hard work in factories, building sites,&nbsp; and on his father's farm in a little wind swept fishing village without electricity. He left school early so has little 'book learning' but he knows how to plant crops, repair a roof, replace a window, maintain his car and look after his family. We are now told by articles like The End of Men that this traditional image of masculinity -&nbsp; a largely self-sufficient man working hard to support his family - is now obsolete and men should model themselves on the feminist neo-liberal image of individuals realizing their potential in a corporate technology driven consumer free market.<br /><br />But the exact opposite is happening.<br /><br />Electronic reading has not rendered the humble book store obsolete. Everywhere historical reenactments are flourishing as men and women drape themselves in cloth rags to bruise each other with blunted weapons. Allotments, farms and gardens are blooming again as people rediscover the pleasure of growing their own food. Carpentry, DIY, cooking and craft skills are all becoming fashionable alternatives to flashing screens in the home and workplace. Everywhere people dissatisfied with the corporate world are turning backwards for the simple reason that they enjoy it.<br /><br />The chattering class still speak of identity politics and alleged misogyny may still boil the blood, but people are living their lives according to traditional virtues. Feminism, not masculinity, therefore needs redefinition away from its self-serving promotion of gender politics and its fantasies of corporate technological utopias hidden beneath the superficial grammar of liberation. People have experienced that world and they don't want it.</div>Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-27344120522749995922015-06-01T15:51:00.001+01:002015-06-01T15:51:56.340+01:00Feasting on tears of defeated opponents. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HbryraljcKo/VWxKMr2SdaI/AAAAAAAABXg/JKMIioa-pGE/s1600/hqdefault.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HbryraljcKo/VWxKMr2SdaI/AAAAAAAABXg/JKMIioa-pGE/s320/hqdefault.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Ireland has passed the same sex referendum and I shall now gleefully and unashamedly savour the tears of defeated opponents with wanton abandon.<br /><br /><a href="http://breathingwithbothlungs.blogspot.ie/2015/05/like-jew-in-germany-1933.html">Breathing with Both Lungs</a><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">There will be a price for this. &nbsp;This will not stop at marriage. &nbsp;As long as Catholics and other Christians are around, along with those who simply recognize the objective nature of moral law, &nbsp;then we will be a living sign of contradiction and we will not be tolerated. &nbsp;I expect that the legal route will be taken first but I doubt they will be able to resist the temptation to go further. &nbsp;The homosexual community are but the tool of darker forces and persons who wish to use them as cover for their own perversity. &nbsp;There are dark days ahead but we will survive. &nbsp;The Faith will not die out in Ireland. &nbsp;The blood of martyrs is seedbed of the Church.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">At the moment though I feel like a Jew in the early days of Nazi Germany. Pray&nbsp;</blockquote>&nbsp;Bat crap crazy tears flavoured with a sprinkling of defiance. Delicious.<br /><br />&nbsp;<a href="http://www.stmichaelnyc.com/pastors-corner/from-the-pastor-1">Rutler</a><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The landslide vote in Eire for legalizing the fictitious form of marriage between persons of the same sex, in contradiction of all laws natural and divine, unearths the pulsating Druidism that Saint Patrick and his fellow saints defied. The estimated $17 million from pressure groups in the United States is no excuse, for people will only be pressured if they are willing to be pressured. Another dismal fact is that over 90% of the young people influenced to subscribe to this vote were formed in Catholic schools. The vote was less in favor of inversion and more in hostility to a Church whose Jansenism and clericalism had incubated corruption and lassitude. While most of Europe suffers from the deadly sin of indifference, or sloth, Ireland is in adolescent rebellion, virulent and irrational. This was exploited by political interests hostile to Christian civilization, and their propaganda combined legitimate accusations against ecclesial failings with a left-wing, secularist agenda.</blockquote>&nbsp;Umm bitter tears.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.thetablet.co.uk/news/2108/0/ireland-is-worse-than-the-pagans-for-legalising-gay-marriage-says-senior-cardinal?">The Tablet:</a><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Ireland has gone further than paganism and “defied God” by legalising gay marriage, one of the Church’s most senior cardinals has said.<br />Cardinal Raymond Burke, who was recently moved from a senior role in the Vatican to be patron of the Order of Malta, told the Newman Society, Oxford University’s Catholic Society, last night that he struggled to understand “any nation redefining marriage”.<br />Visibly moved, he went on: “I mean, this is a defiance of God. It’s just incredible. Pagans may have tolerated homosexual behaviours, they never dared to say this was marriage.”<br />A total of 1.2 million people voted in favour of amending the constitution to allow same-sex couples to marry, with 734,300 against the proposal, making Ireland the first country to introduce gay marriage by popular vote.</blockquote>Bafflement tears. Tangy but with a delightful delicious aroma.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/05/31/irelands-gay-marriage-voters-snakes-gordon-klingenschmitt_n_7479412.html">The Huffington Post</a><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">An American politician likened Ireland’s pro-gay marriage voters to “snakes” on Friday, whilst calling for St. Patrick to return and drive the "demonic spirits" out of the country. Republican Gordon Klingenschmitt, a former US Navy chaplain who is currently a member of the Colorado House of Representatives, reacted to Ireland’s historic gay marriage referendum by admonishing the country's citizens for “rejecting Jesus Christ.”<br />"There was a time when it was said that St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland," said Klingenschmitt on his television show, "and now I'm concerned that the snakes have returned to Ireland. And when I say snakes, I'm not talking about physical snakes, I'm talking about the demonic spirits inside of some of the people you see parading their sin in pride around the country, rejecting not just the Catholic Church but rejecting Jesus Christ himself."</blockquote>One more helping of crazy tears? Don't mind if I do!<br /><br />And for an indulgent desert: &nbsp;a decadent helping of conservative tears:<br /><br /><a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/05/irelands-gay-marriage-vote-was-never-an-equal-contest/">The Spectator</a><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">But in Ireland, the groupthink has a totalitarian aspect to it. I remember meeting one young Irish girl at Oxford a few years ago who declared bathetically that she had given up on the Catholic Church in favour of the Guardian; in a way, the whole country feels as if it has gone the same way. There’s a creepily imitative quality to the liberal consensus – as though the colonial mindset has morphed through clericalism to a self-congratulatory adolescence, perpetually in revolt against the vanished authority of the church. The Irish Times declared in its editorial that this vote represented the country Ireland had become. Yes it does, and not wholly in a good way.</blockquote>*burp*<br /><br />Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-68880700651504518442015-03-23T02:01:00.000+00:002015-03-23T02:01:39.405+00:00Book collecting.A few years ago I looked into book collecting and stumbled across <a href="http://www.foliosociety.com/">the Folio Society</a> which offers hard back collector editions of popular books with custom illustrations at a reasonable price. &nbsp;I am especially tempted by a new edition of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius:<br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qNYCe0WuE3A/VQ9xDRm0Z_I/AAAAAAAABWE/E2OET-PXrQ8/s1600/MDS.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qNYCe0WuE3A/VQ9xDRm0Z_I/AAAAAAAABWE/E2OET-PXrQ8/s1600/MDS.jpg" height="200" width="126" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">via: <a href="http://www.foliosociety.com/book/MDS/meditations">the folio society</a></td></tr></tbody></table>But I wonder what a Stoic would say about my passion? After all I already own a penguin copy of the meditations so buying a hard back copy is just vanity. Irrational attachment or wise use of wealth?<br /><br />Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-31643400116444683012015-03-23T01:17:00.000+00:002015-03-23T01:17:57.491+00:00The challenge of Thrasymachus.<blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_phWos6MMbI/UFs-3qgnZBI/AAAAAAAAAUI/ClbUqyQGIbA/s1600/041312%2Bcolonnade.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_phWos6MMbI/UFs-3qgnZBI/AAAAAAAAAUI/ClbUqyQGIbA/s1600/041312%2Bcolonnade.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></div></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_phWos6MMbI/UFs-3qgnZBI/AAAAAAAAAUI/ClbUqyQGIbA/s1600/041312%2Bcolonnade.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div>"And each ruling group sets down laws for its own advantage."</blockquote>Justice is a social convention, differing from place to place, but created by rulers for their own advantage. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer as they must.<br /><br />These sentiments can be found in a cultural studies text book or read on an activists blog; yet they are found in a famous work of philosophy called 'The Republic' by Plato.<br /><br />The Sophist Thrasymachus (459-400 BC) was a renown teacher of rhetoric who created and perfected several rhetorical styles. Plato (disapprovingly) claimed Thrasymachus could emotionally manipulate large&nbsp;crowds and Aristotle credited him as one of the original founders of rhetoric whose work revolutionized the fledgling field.<br /><br />In The Republic Plato portrays Thrasymachus (whose name means 'bold-fighter') as a fiery young man who forces his way into a philosophical defense of Justice by Socrates:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Now Thrasymachus start out many times to take over the argument in the midst of our discussion, but he had been restrained by the men sitting near him, who wanted to hear the argument out. But when we paused and I said this, he could no longer keep quiet; hunched up like a wild beast, he flung himself at us as if to tear us to pieces.&nbsp;</blockquote>His anger is important. It is the frustrated anger of a young man challenging the traditions and beliefs of his elders and finding them wanting. Virtue and Justice are just lies to trick fools into accepting laws which benefit their rulers. Look to nature, Thrasymachus demands, where we see dominance of the weak by the strong; look to our cities where the unjust and the dishonest prosper while the honest and just suffer. Does Socrates really believe shepherds toil for the benefit of their sheep and rulers toil for our welfare?<br /><div><br />Many of us, I suspect, are cynical enough to agree with Thrasymachus. The political Right is comfortable deploying the grammar of universal ethics defended by Plato and yet so often fall far short of their professed ideals, sometimes to the point of outright corruption. Meanwhile the Left has largely abandoned such moralistic language for sociological analysis of power relationships between gender and class groupings.<br /><br />If Thrasymachus is correct, only the weak follow laws while the wise seek to twist them to their own advantage. Is this an unpalatable truth or simply fatalistic pessimism of the world weary?&nbsp;</div>Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-21597633398542867612015-03-20T02:29:00.000+00:002015-03-20T02:29:18.088+00:00Is Islamic intolerance of homosexuality an Islamophobic myth? <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-__lBT3pDLUw/UrNH6D51MvI/AAAAAAAABGE/wGxYMJTpCT8/s1600/jaw_dropping_butch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-__lBT3pDLUw/UrNH6D51MvI/AAAAAAAABGE/wGxYMJTpCT8/s1600/jaw_dropping_butch.jpg" height="248" width="320" /></a></div><br />Andrew Hernann writing for EverydayFeminism.com defends Islam against claims of homophobia :<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><blockquote class="tr_bq">There is a pervading myth — amongst some Muslims and non-Muslims alike — that Islam promotes intolerance against women and LGBTQIA+ individuals.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">This myth, however, is a dangerous one, as it often prevents non-Muslim feminists from more actively engaging Muslim communities.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Consequently, instead of expanding and empowering the feminist community, well-intentioned non-Muslim feminists sometimes alienate potential Muslim allies and reproduce anti-Muslim prejudices.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">This creates a divide between feminist and Muslim communities. It excludes while inadvertently requiring conformity.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">So, Why the Myth?</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Narrowly citing the Qur’an (Islam’s holy text) and various Hadiths (teachings and accounts of the Prophet Muhammad), some Muslims argue that Islam is cissexist, requires patriarchy, and forbids homosexuality.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">However, many other Muslims maintain that Islam demands compassion, acceptance, and love.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Arguing that an omniscient God created humanity — including the vast diversity within it — they insist that we should not discriminate against one another.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">As such, Islam does not promote intolerance. People say that Islam promotes intolerance. &nbsp;</blockquote></blockquote>The article asserts the common impression of Islam promoting intolerance is nothing but a pervading myth based upon Islamophobic stereotypes "originally developed to promote a racist and capitalist agenda." Incredibly the only supporting evidence for this extraordinary claim is anecdotal: some Muslims believe Islam demands compassion. <br /><br />While I have no doubt that some Muslim individuals and organizations do promote tolerance, how representative of Islam are such views? Do they represent Islam or Islam reinterpreted through our Western liberal Christian culture?<br /><br />Consider for example this map depicting the Islamic population worldwide. Notice the large black block that represents areas with large Muslim majorities: <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fDQZ2NaCEIs/VQsyzgWHJmI/AAAAAAAABVU/iP03gFyrp7g/s1600/Islam_percent_population_in_each_nation_World_Map_Muslim_data_by_Pew_Research.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fDQZ2NaCEIs/VQsyzgWHJmI/AAAAAAAABVU/iP03gFyrp7g/s1600/Islam_percent_population_in_each_nation_World_Map_Muslim_data_by_Pew_Research.svg.png" height="164" width="320" /></a></div><br />Now regard this map:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MGu0uD3DNzU/VQsywVVLLaI/AAAAAAAABVM/lDjz8F1Lsiw/s1600/800px-LGBT_rights_at_the_UN.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MGu0uD3DNzU/VQsywVVLLaI/AAAAAAAABVM/lDjz8F1Lsiw/s1600/800px-LGBT_rights_at_the_UN.svg.png" height="164" width="320" /></a></div><br />See the large block of red that kinda matches the first map showing Muslim dominated countries? The red represents&nbsp;<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/12/18/us-un-homosexuality-idUSTRE4BH7EW20081218">countries who opposed an United Nations proposal to decriminalize homosexuality</a>.<br /><br />I won't bother listing the Islamic countries who continue to reject gay rights because it's quicker to list countries where homosexuality is actually legal. &nbsp;There are only five:&nbsp;Mali, Jordan, Indonesia, Turkey and Albania.&nbsp;<a href="http://globalvoicesonline.org/2014/10/28/5-muslim-countries-where-gays-are-not-persecuted-by-the-law/">While the law in these countries do not criminalize gay lifestyles, LGBT communities still suffer from discrimination and non-negligible pressure to remain discreet regarding their lifestyles.&nbsp;</a><br /><br />So while small Islamic groups and individuals do exist who choose to ignore Muhammad's <a href="http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Islam_and_Homosexuality">explicit command to execute homosexuals</a>,&nbsp;the facts clearly indicate such views are not representative of any significant group within Islam. The facts show the vast majority of Islamic countries do promote intolerance against homosexuals and that intolerance flows directly from their Islamic culture. <br /><i style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.3999996185303px;"><br /></span></span></i>Andrew's claim of Islamic tolerance for homosexuality is so wilfully and egregiously fucking stupid that it could only be believed by an ideological drunkard on a eight year social science bender in an Western university.Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-87516245595917914842015-03-07T01:35:00.000+00:002015-03-20T02:34:54.129+00:00Irish Catholics coverage of the same-sex marriage debate.<a href="http://www.irishcatholic.ie/article/same-sex-marriage-debate-0">The Irish Catholic paper</a> is running a series of articles by an 'interdisciplinary' team of Roman Catholic theologians to "help us consider and respond to the difficult question of same sex marriage." It turns out the question is only difficult for those trying to argue against it.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The referendum, however, proposes to radically redefine marriage in constitutional terms. This constitutional change, if passed, will fundamentally alter our very understanding of marriage. While the legislator has only limited influence over the social realities of modern Ireland, the introduction of same-sex marriage effectively promotes a new ideal of marriage, in which being male or female and father or mother, effectively, become matters of indifference.</blockquote>This position makes little sense. If a person believes marriage is between a man and a women for the purpose of regulating human reproduction, then this person is likely to vote against the proposed amendment. But people who accept marriage is fundamentally about two people &nbsp;in love making a long term commitment to support each other are likely to vote in favor of the referendum for they have no grounds for rejection. Therefore in order for the referendum to succeed, Irish society must already hold a culturally different view of marriage than the roman catholic church and the referendum simply ratifies that cultural difference; our current understanding of marriage is not altered.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The burden of proof, which lies with those who want change, that is, the proponents of same-sex marriage, has not been discharged yet. It is unlikely, however, that children are as well off with gay parents as with their own biological parents. Remember that gay marriage promotes a notion of marriage in which the biological bond between both parents and children is in principle non-existent. Yet biological bonds matter, as controversies surrounding people who have been adopted and are looking for their biological parents, show. Moreover, same-sex couples can never provide the complementarity in difference that a mother and a father can offer.</blockquote>Justice demands a democracy consider the needs and wishes of all her citizens equally unless faced with compelling reasons not to do so. We now have a small section of the community asking for the same right to marry as the vast majority of the adult population. The burden then surely lies on those who would deny this request to demonstrate why it would be detrimental to society. The Irish Catholic article concentrates heavily on child raising, but this is irrelevant as the proposed referendum does not grant same-sex couples the right to adapt.<br /><br />Frankly I've yet to hear a single argument from their camp that isn't self-serving nonsense dressed up as a selfless concern for children's welfare. This is after all an organization that sold children from Irish unwed mothers against their will to 'good' Catholic American families to boost their own political demographics. Better to let a child die of neglect in the cold catholic adaption machine than risk Protestant or gay parents corrupting their souls.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yGg0e3crK40/VBBXG11ObYI/AAAAAAAABRE/yVMBte0VkQk/s1600/BxLEzMPIYAAqlx_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yGg0e3crK40/VBBXG11ObYI/AAAAAAAABRE/yVMBte0VkQk/s1600/BxLEzMPIYAAqlx_.jpg" height="320" width="307" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Blackberries, bacon and children for sale, but only to Catholics.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><br /><br />Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-85481917728200304732015-03-04T11:36:00.000+00:002015-03-04T11:36:14.259+00:00The Feast of St. PatrickWith St. Patrick's Day now less than two weeks away, I decided to post this inspirational speech to start getting you in the proper patriotic mood! <br /><br />This speech was given by the Irish revolutionary Paddy O'Mick shortly before the battle of the five pubs where the Irish successfully drank the British into submission. It is a little know fact that this battle was the downplayed prelude to the eventual formation of the Irish free state.* <br /><br />﻿﻿ <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://wordyrappinghood.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/leprechaun.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://wordyrappinghood.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/leprechaun.gif" width="304" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Artist's impression of Paddy O'Mick</td></tr></tbody></table>﻿﻿ <br />"Proclaim it, friend, throughout the pub,<br />That he which hath no stomach to this session,<br />Let him depart; his passport shall be made<br />And euros for a taxi put into his pocket:<br />We would not drink in that man’s company<br />That fears his fellowship to get locked with us.<br />This day is called the "St. Patrick Day":<br />He that outlives this session, and stumbles safe home,<br />Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,<br />And rouse him at the name of Patrick.<br />He that shall drink this day, and see old age,<br />Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,<br />And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Patrick's Day:’<br />Then will he produce his phone and show his pics.<br />And say ‘These photos I took on Paddy’s day.’<br />Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,<br />But he’ll remember with advantages<br />What drinks he downed that day: then shall our names,<br />Familiar in his mouth as household words<br />Be in their sloshing pints freshly remember’d.<br />This story shall the good man teach his son;<br />And a Paddy's Day shall ne’er go by,<br />From this day to the ending of the world,<br />But we in it shall be remember’d;<br />We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;<br />For he to-day that swigs his pints with me<br />Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,<br />This day shall gentle his condition:<br />And gentlemen in Ireland now a-bed<br />Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,<br />And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks<br />That drank with us upon Saint Patrick’s day."<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>- Paddy O'Mick, battle of five pubs</i>.<br /><br /><br />*<i>May not be entirely historically accurate</i>Hooligan Hobohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08327218802706977678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-29055529231149767712015-03-02T01:46:00.000+00:002015-03-02T01:46:25.756+00:00Susan Neiman on the Stoics. <div class="tr_bq"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2JHz4AoBquQ/Uc7JZ4n4YVI/AAAAAAAAA0Y/PU8UUdSpaW4/s1600/kant-big-321x209.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2JHz4AoBquQ/Uc7JZ4n4YVI/AAAAAAAAA0Y/PU8UUdSpaW4/s1600/kant-big-321x209.jpg" height="208" width="320" /></a></div><br />Susan Neiman is a bit of a strange philosopher whose writing manages the feat of being both defensive and aggressive without sliding into polemics. A self-professed idealist, her work draws heavily on the Enlightenment's' distinction of the <i>is</i> and the <i>ought -&nbsp;</i>&nbsp;how the world is and how it should be.<br /><br />The Enlightenment and it's values are currently deeply unpopular in a cultural arena cluttered with privilege theory, cultural Marxism and religious neo-conservatism. Neiman's writings reflect this for she is simultaneously defending her idealism against claims of naivety while attacking her critics on both sides of the cultural war.&nbsp;</div><br />Little wonder then she is hostile to Stoic philosophy with it's emphasis upon aligning our judgments to reality determined by reason. The following passage is taken from her extended short essay 'Why grow up?' but readers are recommended to read her earlier work 'Moral Clarity: a guide for grown ups.'<br /><blockquote>You've accepted the dimming of sparkle (what looked opalescent was just drew on the grass.) Further: your shock at the fact that the world is not only less sparkly, but downright hideous in places has begun to wear off. Some bits of injustice still pull you up short: &nbsp;the long prison sentence for a hapless whistle blower, say, when the men who ordered torture remains not just at large but in demand. Perhaps it's something simple and immediate as the promotion your flashy coworker got at the office while your quieter efforts went unacknowledged. However wrenching any experiences can be, they no longer have you feeling on the edge of abyss, watching the void between is and ought open before your eyes. You have seen it before, which means you've begun to get used to it. &nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote>This can sound like growing up, which is one reason so many people are afraid of it. With the passing of time and the accumulation of experience, things get repeated, and the more the repetition the less the surprise. As surprise recedes, so does passion. The facts are the same, but you no longer feel them as acutely. And isn't that a boon? Life is thinner and duller, but it doesn't hurt so much, either. Those of us who once trilled to dance and dream until dawn are now content to retire rather earlier to a good bed and pillow. The edge is missing, but so is the hangover. You have learned not to count much on the things outside you: friends and fortune can disappear, and you've seen lives upended by floods, famine or war. The solution you conclude, can only be found inside you. You cannot control much else, but with determination and practice you can learn to control your own emotions, at least enough to ensure that what goes on outside affects you less. You've already accepted the gap between you and the world in principle; what remains is the task of embracing it in practice. The world is unstable, sometimes treacherous, and immeasurably vast; your soul, by contract, is sufficiently limited and malleable to be the sort of thing you might transform. You will sleep better, and hurt less, if you turn your sights inwards, for a good soul is in reach when nothing else is.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote>The pot-bellied uncle who offers this sort of advice has been reading the Stoics, or the bastardized bits of them than can be found in many a modern self-help manual, but he hasn't studied Kant.</blockquote>This passage is striking as a reasonable description of middle age and indeed much of Neiman's essay is loosely based around Kant's metaphor of the Enlightenment being a form of maturity.<br /><br />Dogmatism, according to Kant and Neiman, is like a child taking their first steps, questioning their environment and accepting answers on trust. Adolescence brings both skepticism with the discovery of adults being fallible and anger that the world is vastly different than reason demands. Finally maturity arrives not through resigning ourselves to the world but through accepting the world can tragically never be as reason dictates it should be. The gap between the <i>is </i>and the <i>ought</i> will always exist and adults must navigate this reality caught between hope and despair.<br /><br />For Kant this refusal to accept the world is a courageous strength which stems from reason itself for reality is not rational. A Stoic might reply that by all means try to change the world if that is your nature but what will be, will be, regardless of your desires. Gravity will always pull downward, we will always lose the ones we love and bad things will always happen to good people. We can speak of courageous strength or we can prepare ourselves for what must come.Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-1640167338999019362015-02-10T21:05:00.000+00:002015-02-10T21:05:39.930+00:00Scientists reveal worlds first selfie.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Architectural information scientists have revealed what is believed to be the world oldest collection of selfies dating back over 4000 years to classical Greece. &nbsp;</div><br />"Classical texts spoke of an technological eye which girls needed to see the world. &nbsp;That's well known.", explained Professor Jones, "but our mistake was in assuming this device was mythical. We now have solid proof that such a device did indeed exist."<br /><br />We put it to the good Professor that while some accounts describe these eye users, the so called Stygian Witches, as beautiful young girls, others have them as aged hags : "Filters and lighting. Same as today." <br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http%3A%2F%2F2.bp.blogspot.com%2F-GP854loE3oA%2FVNpjtphHrXI%2FAAAAAAAABT0%2Fxpgex0R01Nw%2Fs1600%2FmXnMvLKXSKuAEvEL1hBN_clash_titans_witches_eye.jpg&amp;container=blogger&amp;gadget=a&amp;rewriteMime=image%2F*" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GP854loE3oA/VNpjtphHrXI/AAAAAAAABT0/xpgex0R01Nw/s1600/mXnMvLKXSKuAEvEL1hBN_clash_titans_witches_eye.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Worlds first bathroom selfie. The facial expression is eerily familiar to a modern day teenager. &nbsp;</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-symRkrv6tGs/VNpjtnvYZLI/AAAAAAAABTs/6-PNscVXh_4/s1600/clas%2Bof%2Btitans%2Bwitches%2Bold.jpg" height="304" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">Group selfie before dinner. &nbsp;</span><span style="text-align: start;">Hygiene was of course extremely primate.</span></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http%3A%2F%2F4.bp.blogspot.com%2F-5Bn-jRu9hmY%2FVNpjtt97fTI%2FAAAAAAAABTw%2Fnp9kGE_iIko%2Fs1600%2F2541_4.jpg&amp;container=blogger&amp;gadget=a&amp;rewriteMime=image%2F*" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5Bn-jRu9hmY/VNpjtt97fTI/AAAAAAAABTw/np9kGE_iIko/s1600/2541_4.jpg" height="223" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">A parent&nbsp;confiscates the eye, possibly for failing to clean their room.</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-V9ahd5ZeWCY/VNpuL216cUI/AAAAAAAABUM/hSPkq22-DLs/s1600/_80883334_teenagers_getty.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-V9ahd5ZeWCY/VNpuL216cUI/AAAAAAAABUM/hSPkq22-DLs/s1600/_80883334_teenagers_getty.jpg" height="223" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Modern day teenagers retain their historic dependence upon a technological &nbsp;eye.</td></tr></tbody></table>Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-15363801016508057892015-02-05T00:21:00.000+00:002015-02-05T00:21:41.391+00:00Children cannot make up their own minds about religion?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-X0nSVXkYKS4/VNKbjZFs_oI/AAAAAAAABTY/toeHuqefzAA/s1600/047-Indoctrination.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-X0nSVXkYKS4/VNKbjZFs_oI/AAAAAAAABTY/toeHuqefzAA/s1600/047-Indoctrination.jpeg" height="320" width="285" /></a></div><br />Jason Stubblefield on <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/about/?permalink=about">FirstThings.com</a> asks&nbsp;<a href="http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/12/should-children-make-up-their-own-minds-about-religion">Should Children Make Up Their Own Minds About Religion?</a>.&nbsp;First Things is published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life, an organization created "to confront the ideology of secularism".<br /><br />Jason suggests our belief in the ability of children to freely choose their own religion is an erroneous idea inherited from the Enlightenments faith in unbiased, neutral reason. All reason, we are told, is tradition based and it is only from living within certain customs and practices that children can learn the grammar necessary to reason within that tradition. Allowing children to make up their own minds "implicitly makes up their minds for them, because it teaches them that they have the sort of minds that Enlightenment rationality assumes. It teaches them that their thinking comes before God, rather than the other way around." Parents should therefore teach children the gospel for it is both true and good parenting. <br /><br />Arguments based around tradition evolved in England in opposition to the French revolution and the subsequent dominance of French rationalism over the European continent. Tradition was again deployed to counter the utilitarianism of 20th century Communism and even to ward off the occasional American pragmatist. In what follows I lump both utilitarianism and pragmatism into the same bucket as rationalism.<br /><br />Rationalism assumes humans are goal-seeking beings; that we pursue independently premeditated goals whether the goal is a result to be achieved or an activity to be enjoyed. It further assumes the necessary means to reach a goal are available and achievable. These steps are taken before the activity has begun and are only possible thanks to the universal human facility of reason, <br /><br />Tradition attacks rationalism for being, at best, a deficient theory of human behaviour with no basis in reality. A rationalists conception of human action deals with a set of rules or principles or procedures which can be formulated in written form. But there is a second form of knowledge, inseparable from the first, that can be called practical knowledge as it exists only in use, is not reflective and cannot be formulated in rules. It is the dismissal of practical, tradition based knowledge that renders rationalism such a caricature of human conduct. End goals can never be solely chosen prior to an activity because it is only within the tradition of an activity that a person gains the abstract and practical knowledge necessary to identify goals and the means to reach them. Rationalism therefore see no obstacles to, say, imposing federal democracy in Iraq where no such tradition has ever existed or in radially changing a personal lifestyle by following rational exercise goals and motivation techniques.<br /><br />Arguments from tradition are worth taking seriously as very arrow, specific arguments targeting rationalism. However the FirstThings article falls into the common conservative trap of turning such arguments into post-modern cultural relativism:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">There is no such thing as neutral or unbiased reason, because all reason springs from a system of practices and beliefs that make reasoning possible. This is true in systems ranging from Christianity to Buddhism to the sciences. In all these traditions, people learn to reason by a process of initiation—by living within the practices and beliefs of those traditions. It is only after they have learned the grammar of a particular tradition that they are able to begin reasoning within it.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">The question, then, isn’t whether kids are free to make up their own minds about religion with independent objectivity. Rather, the question is which tradition of rationality is shaping children’s reasoning.</blockquote>The author's tradition of rationality apparently involves making universal truth claims such as "the gospel is truth" and "there is no such thing as neutral or unbiased reason" while simultaneously stating the reasoning behind such claims are dependent upon cultural tradition. Are we to understand Christianity is legitimately both true and&nbsp;false depending on the 'grammar' involved? Or perhaps he believes truth can be obtained regardless of the tradition involved. If so, it is rather irrelevant which tradition of rationality influences our children.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Letting kids make up their minds about religion implicitly makes up their minds for them, because it teaches them that they have the sort of minds that Enlightenment rationality assumes. It teaches them that their thinking comes before God, rather than the other way around. It reverses St. Anselm’s dictum “faith seeking understanding,” so that understanding seeks whatever faith it likes, or no faith at all. It renders human reason an impartial arbiter, rather than the imprint of the God who ordered all creation, who is above all and in all, who fashioned the minds with which we think.</blockquote>We are told in typically offhand dogmatic fashion that god imprinted us with knowledge of itself and fashioned our minds as capable of detecting its works through the natural order. Ordinarily this line is tossed out as proof that atheists and heathens are aware of god but reject him out of anger or pride. Here however it completely undermines the entire argument as it points towards neutral, unbiased reason capable of deducing the existence of a creator God through natural law independent of cultural tradition. <br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">We make our children eat their vegetables. We make them brush their teeth. Let’s make them go to church. In doing so, we will be no more guilty of indoctrination than the parents who let their kids “make up” their own minds about religion, because all reason is tradition-based. After all, we Christians do not think that the Gospel is merely a matter of personal opinion. We believe it is true.&nbsp;</blockquote>How many parents would willingly allow their children to spend day after day reciting advertising slogans in classrooms? How many would dress up to bring their children to the local shopping mall to listen with respectful unquestioning silence to a sales pitch? &nbsp;Not very many I would hope. Yet it happens every day and every week in faith schools and churches around the world. This is not simply installing a good habit like daily teeth brushing. This is outright indoctrination through repetition and emotional anchoring. &nbsp;Hiding behind cultural relativism is nothing but a failed obfuscation.Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-5389231011112846822015-01-20T22:51:00.000+00:002015-01-20T22:51:15.508+00:00Muslim envy. <div class="tr_bq">Sometimes roman catholics don't bother even trying to hide their Muslim envy:&nbsp;</div><blockquote>Bishop Philip Boyce has urged Catholics to follow the lead of Muslims and Jews and object when people use the name of God in an offensive way.</blockquote><blockquote>Dr Boyce said: 'It is sad to hear the name of Jesus being used carelessly and unheedingly, at times as a curse instead of a blessing, in uncultured and rough language.</blockquote><blockquote>'It is offensive in public, and if used over the airwaves in a reckless manner, a person would have to apologise,' Dr Boyce said in a new pastoral letter 'Holy Is His Name' due to be released this week.</blockquote><blockquote>'Just as Muslims do not allow Mohammed's name to be profaned, and the Jews regarded God's name as revealed to Moses as too holy to be pronounced, so Christians should keep holy the name of Jesus,' Bishop Boyce insists. <a href="http://www.irishcatholic.ie/article/catholics-urged-follow-muslim-lead-reject-religious-cursing">[link]</a></blockquote>Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-58101160896079708692015-01-18T15:56:00.000+00:002015-01-18T15:56:07.968+00:00Historical evidence: The “miracles” of Morihei Ueshiba and…… Jesus?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dE5iWU67GAo/VLvXCQUSwGI/AAAAAAAABS8/oYe9vi9Cnkw/s1600/MoriheiUeshiba50.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dE5iWU67GAo/VLvXCQUSwGI/AAAAAAAABS8/oYe9vi9Cnkw/s1600/MoriheiUeshiba50.jpg" height="251" width="320" /></a></div><div class="tr_bq"><br /></div><div class="tr_bq">I dabbled briefly in the martial art of Aikido, sometimes called “The art of peace”. Aikido is a strange martial art requiring its practitioners to extend compassion and consideration to the attacker by stopping the fight without injury to either party. As my instructor once said during practice “Your attacker is angry. There is something wrong with him. You want to help him, not hurt him”.</div><br />Aikido (ai - joining, harmonizing; ki - spirit, life energy, do - way, path) was founded by Morihei Ueshiba as the “path of harmony and love, unifying body and mind, self and others, humans and the universe”. Ueshiba is also credited with a number of improbable superhuman feats. I want to compare the types and quality of evidence for these feats with that of Jesus.<br /><br /><u>The miracle of Morihei Ueshiba bullet dodging.</u><br /><u><br /></u>What follows is an eye witness account by Gozo Shioda, a student of Ueshiba, which recounts the story of Morihel Ueshiba dodging the bullets fired by six trained army officers with ‘Olympic level shooting ability’:<br /><blockquote>The six men then positioned themselves, aiming at Ueshiba Sensei. While staring at him, I kept thinking helplessly that twenty-five meters is a considerable distance, and was wondering what on earth Sensei could do from there.<br />One, two, three. The six revolvers fired at the same time and a cloud of dust whirled around us. Then, suddenly, one of the six marksmen was flying through the air! What had happened? Before we could figure it out, Sensei was standing behind the six men, laughing into his beard.<br />We all were bewildered. I really and truly could not understand what had happened. Not just me, but everyone present was so stunned that we could not find words to express our shock. The six inspectors were not yet convinced and asked if Sensei could do it again. “All right” he answered indifferently.<br />Once again, the six barrels were aimed at Ueshiba Sensei and were fired. This time the inspector at the edge of the group flew into the air. In exactly the same way as before, Ueshiba Sensei was standing behind the six inspectors before we knew what was happening. I was dumbfounded. That time I had promised myself to watch carefully in order to see exactly what Sensei was doing. But even though I had tried very hard, I was completely unable to see how he had moved. <a href="http://www.aikidofaq.com/history/story.html">[link]</a></blockquote><u>The evidence.</u><br /><br />Aikdio is a respected martial art taught to police officers worldwide where the emphasis on ending the fight without injury either party has obvious applications. Gozo Shioda, the eye witness quoted above, is himself a respected martial artist who founded his own worldwide form of Aikido, called Yoshinkan Aikido. Morihei Ueshiba was a spiritual as well as a physical teacher who sought to create a peaceful utopia upon earth. There are even those who claim the self defense techniques of Aikido are irrelevant and who practice the art only as a form of spiritual mediation.<br /><br />Now, I don’t believe the story of Ueshiba dodging bullets. His quoted explanation in the source above is rather unconvincing to say the least:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">God has said that I am necessary for this world and has decided to let me live. My period of purification is not over so I cannot die. When I am not necessary for this world anymore the gods will let me pass away.” Sensei seemed to be convinced, but of course we couldn’t understand what he meant.</blockquote>&nbsp;Given the incredible nature of the claim, most people would agree, quite reasonably, that further evidence is needed. A single eye witness account from a student written some time after the event (presumably as the story is taken from an autobiography) is not very persuasive. In historical terms, the source quoted above is a public secondary discursive source as it was published some time after the event occurred.<br /><br />Now consider this story:<br /><blockquote>And straightway Jesus constrained his disciples to get into a ship, and to go before him unto the other side, while he sent the multitudes away.<br />And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there alone.<br />But the ship was now in the midst of the sea, tossed with waves: for the wind was contrary.<br />And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea.<br />And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear.<br />But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.<br />And Peter answered him and said, Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water.<br />And he said, Come. And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus.<br />But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me.<br />And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?<br />And when they were come into the ship, the wind ceased.<br />Then they that were in the ship came and worshipped him, saying, Of a truth thou art the Son of God. &nbsp;(Matthew 14:22-33 (King James Version))</blockquote>This is another eye witness account of a superhuman deed recorded some time after the event. My question is as follows: If a single recorded eyewitness account is not evidence enough to accept the spiritual teacher Ueshiba could dodge bullets, why should anyone accept Matthew's account of Jesus walked on water?<br /><br />And if you believe Ueshiba dodged bullets and Jesus walked on water, well, I know some interesting investment opportunities that may interest you.Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-33739735073374680432015-01-18T14:37:00.001+00:002015-01-18T14:37:48.713+00:00I have to draw him.I found this on a forum, unsourced.&nbsp;<div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://wp.newrepublic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/eli-valley-120767-1200x2179.png" /><span id="goog_1239682494"></span><span id="goog_1239682495"></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a></div><div><br /></div>Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2661999549258527122.post-42227931489034917992015-01-18T14:33:00.002+00:002015-01-18T14:33:52.324+00:00In The News: Fitness Fads.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-__lBT3pDLUw/UrNH6D51MvI/AAAAAAAABGE/wGxYMJTpCT8/s1600/jaw_dropping_butch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-__lBT3pDLUw/UrNH6D51MvI/AAAAAAAABGE/wGxYMJTpCT8/s1600/jaw_dropping_butch.jpg" height="248" width="320" /></a></div><br />Occasionally I stumble upon a news item that drops my jaw to the keyboard. &nbsp;Now, I am a pretty hardened Internet surfer and it takes a lot to truly surprise me, but this, this is pretty special :-<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Fitness tracking company Jawbone has a system that lets businesses monitor the activity data of their employees.&nbsp;The system, called UP for Groups, combines movement, eating and sleep data from Jawbone's apps and wearable trackers, which is then anonymised before being shown to bosses.&nbsp;Jawbone hopes the system will help companies combat obesity by promoting healthy behaviour in the workplace.&nbsp;<span style="font-size: x-small;">[<a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30554496">via: BBC</a>]</span></blockquote>Yes - an electronic tag providing employers with metrics of their employees eating and sleeping habits. Surely they wouldn't fucking dare suggest a healthy work force is good for company productivity and profits? &nbsp;But, yep, they went there:-<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><blockquote class="tr_bq">Success comes from combining individual behavior change and group culture change. With UP for Groups, we can bring our proven experience in individual behavior change to deliver collective impact. This is the opportunity to transform the health of companies, groups and larger organizations.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">How well we sleep—and healthy we are —has a clear impact on our workplaces. So we want to inspire a health-focused conversation in the workplace, while encouraging everyone to strive for a better work-health balance. It also comes from trying new techniques to inspire healthier behaviors. That could mean walking meetings, using the stairs rather than the elevator, healthier food options, and standing desks. [<a href="https://jawbone.com/blog/up-for-groups/">link</a>]</blockquote></blockquote>I find our health industry fascinating because it is so utterly broken.We are peddled promises of earthly salvation, of transforming our vice ridden lives through rationally directed goal setting. Our health will improve, we will become more attractive and find that special someone, our careers will suddenly take off &nbsp;as we tap into our new disciple and mental energy.<br /><br />But of course it doesn't work for most people. So we outsource our willpower to personal trainers or buy faddish technology like this electronic tag for groups to maintain the illusion of rational self-directed free will. Or you can just embrace old-school behaviorism by turning yourself into one of Pavlov's dogs with a bracelet that administrators electronic shocks to break bad habits:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">A US company has crowd-funded over $200,000 (£127,000) for a device that helps you break bad habits using electric shocks.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">The Pavlok wristband delivers a 255 volt shock if you dare to visit time-wasting websites, with the aim of conditioning your behaviour for the better. <a href="http://www.newscron.com/render/2999879/346758287">[link]</a></blockquote>I recommend a volt bracelet used in conjunction with daily deep yoga mediation, positive thinking, goal tracking software, positive reinforcement through self-administrated treats, angel prayers, a diet of pure organic vegetables and exercise three times daily. After four weeks you won't recognize the new you!Gavin Doylehttps://plus.google.com/115305906154095465043noreply@blogger.com0